Keeping Brand Visibility Flowing: a Look at Brand Streaming

The concept of brand streaming is the ability to tell your story across multiple mediums, creating an “always on” presence that attracts and engages people when they’re actively seeking information, whether they’re chatting on social networks or using a search engine. With this approach, brands are tasked with being not only entertaining but informative, accessible and engaging. This can be a lot to handle if the communications teams and processes aren’t empowered to develop messages dynamically and respond quickly as opportunities arise. This week on our webinar titled, “Keeping Your Brand Visibility Flowing through Content: A Look at Brand Streaming in Action” a fantastic panel spelled out best practices and tactics for implementing a brand streaming strategy. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap highlighting the takeaways that you can apply to your own campaigns.

Rebekah King, senior manager of consumer communications for Kelley Blue Book (@KelleyBlueBook on Twitter) kicked off the discussion by describing upon how KBB has built a cohesive team to pool content from various verticals in the company. Her social team builds their content strategy and produces content themselves but leverages the expertise of other departments like PR, Marketing, Customer Service, Market Intel, etc. This strategy allows KBB to use every angle of their organization to inform their audience.

When dealing with social media, Rebekah said, “Social media is not a monarchy, it is a democracy,” noting the best way to be successful with social media outreach is to get each and every unit of an organization involved in the process. She also emphasized the importance of measurement and analytics. Using analytics KBB can see what content is producing better results, and they’re able to quickly tweak their messaging to adapt to the changing needs of their audience. Additionally, the empirical nature of measurement data makes it easy for others to understand what type of content generates the best results. Sharing that data with others on the team encourages everyone to create the sort of content they know their audience will appreciate. Rebekah did make the point of noting that methodology an organization uses to measure social media performance should be made in a manner that fits with how it values its business processes.

Our second presenter, Matt Gentile, global director of PR & social media Century 21 Real Estate (@Century21)offered a look at how Century 21 is using Facebook as a tool for their 100,000+ agents and a way to engage core audiences. He believes for his organization, Facebook works because it allows them to reach their audience in a variety of ways. When he took over social media for Century 21, Matt set the goal to get the professionals that work with Century 21, both inside and outside of the organization, to become more familiar with the company – and their content and tools – through Facebook. One of the biggest challenges that Matt has seen with Facebook and other social media platforms is that people tend to think that they are solely platforms for advertising. In reality, as he stated, “Social media is a way to build your sphere of influence”. He believes that the best way to be successful in building this sphere is to “share, respond, and recognize” no matter the social media platforms. Matt made it clear that he believes you should always engage with social media users if they are providing positive commentary. If they are giving negative feedback, he advised that an organization respond to that person with an email where they can state their problem and work on solving it. Matt finished by speaking how he views Pintrest as the next social media platform that more organizations will begin to utilize.